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Cailliau is head of the Web office for
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Lamenting the lack of
creativity in software products, Cailliau acknowledged that coming up with
new products for the digital world was a complex task.
“You need a mental model of what happens
inside a computer as this does not correspond to the real world. The content
you see, structuring and formats, window graphics, the interface and the
operating systems need a mental picture to be understood.”
He said physical goods were difficult to
copy because of their visibility whereas digital goods could be copied at
zero cost, but were invisible and complex.
Noting that while about 95% of people have
the intellectual capacity to drive a car, he suggested that only 5% of the
population would be able to programme a computer.
Driving one system
He then asked various delegates what cars
they drove and noted wide variety—Volvo, Honda, Land Rover, VW and Saab. The
same delegates responded that the operating system they all used was Windows
(one added “and Linux”).
Cailliau expressed grave reservations
about committing one’s data to a proprietary system on a server that might
not even be located in one’s own country. He urged the delegates to
formulate a set of open international standards that they could apply to
this problem. He noted that his slide presentation at the conference was
“100% free of Microsoft products”.
Answering a question from the floor,
Cailliau said he believed that the developing communities had the ability to
be more creative than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. A
distinction should be made between two elements in the digital divide: the
innate abilities
divide and the economic divide.
“Innate abilities mean that only a
minority is capable of dealing effectively with the digital world and
therefore there is scope for abuse. The economic divide
refers to the North-South divide, and is determined by
the economies of different countries and regions,” he said.
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